All about politics – they just want to find a way to demonize and distance themselves from oil.

The panel appointed by President Barack Obama to investigate the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is short on technical expertise but long on talking publicly about “America’s addiction to oil.” One member has blogged about it regularly.

Only one of the seven commissioners, the dean of Harvard’s engineering and applied sciences school, has a prominent engineering background — but it’s in optics and physics. Another is an environmental scientist with expertise in coastal areas and the after-effects of oil spills. Both are praised by other scientists.

The five other commissioners are experts in policy and management.

The White House said the commission will focus on the government’s “too cozy” relationship with the oil industry. A presidential spokesman said panel members will “consult the best minds and subject matter experts” as they do their work.

The commission has yet to meet, yet some panel members had made their views known

Environmental activist Frances Beinecke on May 27 blogged: “We can blame BP for the disaster and we should. We can blame lack of adequate government oversight for the disaster and we should. But in the end, we also must place the blame where it originated: America’s addiction to oil.”

And on June 3, May 27, May 22, May 18, May 4, she called for bans on drilling offshore and the Arctic.

“Even as questions persist, there is one thing I know for certain: the Gulf oil spill isn’t just an accident. It’s the result of a failed energy policy,” Beinecke wrote on May 20.

Two other commissioners also have gone public to urge bans on drilling.

Barack Obama doesn’t do the mundane. He was sent to us to do larger things. You could see that plainly in his Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill.

He could barely get himself through the pedestrian first half: a bit of BP-bashing, a bit of faux-Clintonian “I feel your pain,” a bit of recovery and economic mitigation accounting.

It wasn’t until the end of the speech — the let-no-crisis-go-to-waste part that tried to leverage the Gulf Coast devastation to advance his cap-and-trade climate-change agenda — that Obama warmed to his task.

Pedestrian is beneath Obama. Mr. Fix-It he is not. He is world-historical, the visionary, come to make the oceans recede and the planet heal.

How? By creating a glorious, new, clean green economy.

And how exactly to do that? From Washington, by presidential command and with tens of billions of dollars thrown around.

With the liberal (and professorial) conceit that scientific breakthroughs can be legislated into existence, Obama proposes to give us a new industrial economy.

But is this not what we’ve been trying to do for decades with ethanol, which remains a monumental boondoggle, economically unviable and environmentally damaging to boot?

As with yesterday’s panacea, synfuels, into which Jimmy Carter poured billions.

Notice that Obama no longer talks about Spain, which until recently he repeatedly cited for its visionary subsidies of a blossoming new clean energy industry.

That’s because Spain, now on the verge of bankruptcy, is pledged to reverse its disastrously bloated public spending, including radical cuts in subsidies to its uneconomical photovoltaic industry.

There’s a reason petroleum is such a durable fuel. It’s not, as Obama fatuously suggested, because of oil company lobbying but because it is very portable, energy dense and easy to use.

But this doesn’t stop Obama from thinking that he can mandate into being a superior substitute. His argument: Well, if we can put a man on the moon, why not this?

Aside from the irony that this most tiresome of cliches comes from a president who is canceling our program to return to the moon, it is utterly meaningless.

The wars on cancer and on poverty have been similarly sold. They remain unwon. Why? Because we knew how to land on the moon. We had the physics to do it.

Cancer cells, on the other hand, are far more complex than the Newtonian equations that govern a moon landing. Equally daunting are the laws of social interaction — even assuming there are any — that sustain a culture of poverty.

Similarly, we don’t know how to make renewables that match the efficiency of fossil fuels. In the interim, it is Obama and his Democratic allies who, as they dream of such scientific leaps, are unwilling to use existing technologies to reduce our dependence on foreign (i.e., imported) and risky (i.e., deep-water) sources of oil — twin dependencies that Obama decried in Tuesday’s speech.

“Part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean,” said Obama, is “because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.”

Running out of places on land? What about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the less-known National Petroleum Reserve — 23 million acres of Alaska’s North Slope, near the existing pipeline and designated nearly a century ago for petroleum development — that have been shut down by the federal government?

Running out of shallow water sources? How about the Pacific Ocean, a not inconsiderable body of water, and its vast U.S. coastline? That’s been off-limits to new drilling for three decades.

We haven’t run out of safer and more easily accessible sources of oil. We’ve been run off them by environmentalists. They prefer to dream green instead.

Obama is dreamer in chief: He wants to take us to this green future “even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet precisely know how we’re going to get there.”

Here’s the offer: Tax carbon, spend trillions and put government in control of the energy economy — and he will take you he knows not where, by way of a road he knows not which.

That’s why Tuesday’s speech was received with such consternation. It was so untethered from reality.

The Gulf is gushing, and the president is talking mystery roads to unknown destinations.

That passes for vision, and vision is Obama’s thing. It sure beats cleaning up beaches.

Idiots! They stopped cleanup operations on all barges to inspect them for life jackets! Seriously? What morons.

Sixteen barges sat stationary today, although they were sucking up thousands of gallons of BP’s oil as recently as Tuesday. Workers in hazmat suits and gas masks pumped the oil out of the Louisiana waters and into steel tanks. It was a homegrown idea that seemed to be effective at collecting the thick gunk.

“These barges work. You’ve seen them work. You’ve seen them suck oil out of the water,” said Jindal.

So why stop now?

“The Coast Guard came and shut them down,” Jindal said. “You got men on the barges in the oil, and they have been told by the Coast Guard, ‘Cease and desist. Stop sucking up that oil.'”

A Coast Guard representative told ABC News today that it shares the same goal as the governor.

“We are all in this together. The enemy is the oil,” said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Dan Lauer.

But the Coast Guard ordered the stoppage because of reasons that Jindal found frustrating. The Coast Guard needed to confirm that there were fire extinguishers and life vests on board, and then it had trouble contacting the people who built the barges.

Check out the agenda for Bilderberg 2010: “Financial reform, security, cyber technology, energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, world food problem, global cooling, social networking, medical science, EU-US relations.” That list is a window into your future. Don’t think for one minute that it isn’t. And don’t ignore it, because it isn’t ignoring you.

I love how “social networking” must fry the Bilderbergian mind. On the one hand, as Zuckerberg of Facebook says, privacy is no longer a social norm so it’s okay to milk the networking sites for information, social trends and dissident thinking; however, you can’t stop the people from arranging a meet-up to discuss internet censorship or the rights and wrongs of “global cooling”. Speaking of which, Bill Gates (Bilderberg 2010) is funding “cloud whitening” technology; trials start soon. Global dimming isn’t just something that happens every time Big Brother starts. On the basis of this agenda, I think we can expect a lot of statements about cutting-edge cloud-technology trials in the next 12 months. If it works in Dubai, it can work in Britain too…

Eight weeks into the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of the Mexico, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has told the National Guard that there’s no time left to wait for BP, so they’re taking matters into their own hands.
Before his speech, the president takes another look at the oil-tainted region.

In Fort Jackson, La., Jindal has ordered the Guard to start building barrier walls right in the middle of the ocean. The barriers, built nine miles off shore, are intended to keep the oil from reaching the coast by filling the gaps between barrier islands.

And it will take 16 years to start actually getting any return. Not to mention this will be GREAT for any car companies out there that can’t make money as it is. Like GM for example. But those are just details.

Using a 2007 base vehicle, the committee estimated the potential fuel savings and costs to consumers of available technology combinations for three types of engines: spark-ignition gasoline, compression-ignition (CI) diesel, and hybrid. According to its estimates, adopting the full combination of improved technologies in medium and large cars and pickup trucks with spark-ignition engines could reduce fuel consumption by 29 percent at an additional cost of $2,200 to the consumer. Replacing spark-ignition engines with diesel engines and components would yield fuel savings of about 37 percent at an added cost of approximately $5,900 per vehicle, and replacing spark-ignition engines with hybrid engines and components would reduce fuel consumption by 43 percent at an increase of $6,000 per vehicle.

…Hybrid vehicle technologies are one of the most active areas of research and development. The degree of hybridization can vary from minor vehicle stop-start systems to complete vehicle redesign. A fully hybrid vehicle could reduce fuel consumption by about 50 percent at an estimated price increase of up to $9,000 a vehicle depending on vehicle size. …

This is a must read! I urge you to go here and look now. If I though I wouldn’t run afoul of copyright laws I’d repost in it’s entirety. This is an awesome piece.

Cast your mind back to January 2009, when Barack Obama became the president of the United States amid much rejoicing. The hosannas—covering the inauguration was “the honor of our lifetimes,” said MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews—by then seemed unsurprising. Over the course of a long campaign, hyperbolic rhetoric had become commonplace, so much so that online wags had started calling Obama “the One”—a reference to the spate of recent science-fiction movies, especially The Matrix, that used that term to designate a messiah.

It all seems so long ago now, as one contemplates President Obama’s plummeting approval ratings and a suddenly resurgent Republican Party. Yet it’s worth looking closely and seriously at the election-year enthusiasm of media elites and other Obamaphiles, much of which was indeed, as the wags recognized, quasi-religious. The surprising fact is that the American Left, for all its claims to being “reality-based” and secular, is often animated by the passions, motivations, and imagery that one normally associates with religion. The better we understand this religious impulse, the better we will understand liberal America’s likely trajectory in the years to come.

That’s right, Obama. YOU sir, have responded so slowly there is no way to get ahead of this thing. In this case of clear federal jurisdiction the fed fell flat on it’s face. Government that is too big is useless for anything except for getting bigger.

Bush’s response in LA was slow, but he was taken by surprise by the total lack of professionalism, pride, preparedness, and responsibility of the LA (Democrat) leadership, who was tasked with being the primary line of defense for it’s people. The fed has a place there, but as a supplement or backup for local and state authorities. His mistake was in not realizing how far the modern left has fallen. The modern left is incapable of action in a situation like that, because they expect the fed to come ‘save’ them. They expect someone else to do it.

There can be no such confusion when the sole authority and responsibility resides in the fed, as in this case. O has failed again.

Oh, and I still find this whole affair fishy.

The rapidly expanding environmental catastrophe caused by the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana is presenting a growing political challenge to the Obama White House, with Mr. Obama and his aides at pains to defend the response and forestall comparisons to the Hurricane Katrina crisis.

Nine days after British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew apart and began spewing 5,000 barrels of oil a day into the Gulf of Mexico, a massive oil slick is set to wash ashore on the southern coast Thursday evening and, experts say, could dwarf the damage caused by the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.

Failure to get control of the relief effort and contain the environmental challenge could pose the same kind of political threat to Mr. Obama’s popular standing that the much-criticized handling of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina did for former President George W. Bush. And unlike Katrina, it is likely the federal government will be the clear lead authority in dealing with the BP spill.

Mark my words, this is no accident. Way too coincidental that a disaster of this proportion would happen at the same time as the same issue is hot in Washington. Way too coincidental.

**Update**
So if this is just an accident, why are SWAT teams being sent to all the oil rigs in the Gulf? SWAT teams? Really? For an accident? This is all very convenient. And it allows the administration to backtrack on their hollow promises to drill. He gets the best of both worlds.

VENICE, Louisiana (AFP) – The US Thursday declared the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico a disaster of “national significance” as heavy onshore winds threatened to blow the slick onto the fragile Louisiana coast.

President Barack Obama started his day with a special 20-minute briefing on the disaster and pledged “all available resources,” including the military, to try and stave off a possible environmental disaster.

The presence of the giant slick, now said to be growing five times faster then previously thought, just 15 miles off Louisiana’s ecologically vulnerable shores dominated a White House press briefing.

“We will use all available resources, possibly including those at the Department of Defense,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters.

Oh sure, there is always some more to do to clean things up, and as good stewards of God’s creation we will, but NOT as some kind of leftist/statist scheme of control. We’ve done a lot already and we should be congratulated for what we’ve accomplished! Follow the link.

On this Earth Day, like every Earth Day, you’ll hear an awful lot about what you ought to do in order to save a planet supposedly in peril, but precious little about what you have already done. This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Earth Day, along with the fortieth anniversary of the passage of the Clean Air Act and the thirty-eighth anniversary of the passage of the Clean Water Act in their modern forms. Congress passed other environmental legislation, before and after, but nothing really compares to the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts when it comes to the scope of sweeping changes that these two environmental mandates have imposed on our lives and the unprecedented, almost unbelievable, record of achievement that these two Acts represent. Activists spend so much time instructing us to “go green” that the fact that we turned green forty years ago, and have done nothing but get greener ever since, is lost to all but the most astute observers.

Any dispassionate analysis of the record – and we’ll get to that in a bit – makes it clear that the United States has done a truly remarkable job of cleaning up the air, water and soil in this country. Every one of us has been a part of that and the money that we have expended to make green happen, should anyone ever account for those costs, would boggle the mind. You pay for green every time you purchase a vehicle chock full of the latest and greatest emissions controls. You pay for green with every check you write to your local utility, for without your increased financial obligations the utility could not pay for all of the new pollution controls that they have had to install. You pay for green in every gallon of paint you buy, with every trip to the grocery store and every time you crack a water faucet, for all of these acts, and hundreds more, factor in the cost of going as green as we have chosen to go. Yet, in spite of all you have done simply by tacitly accepting the need to “save the planet” and quietly paying whatever price was demanded, it’s not nearly enough for the environmental movement. On this Earth Day, like every Earth Day, they’ll metaphorically their wag their fingers and tell you that you need to do more. What organizations like Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council never do on Earth Day, because it would constitute financial suicide if they did, is to extend a hand and say “thank you” in recognition of all that you have accomplished.

What? Oh yes, it’s true, and it’s not a coincidence. These people realized in the 70’s that communism as it had been implemented just wasn’t working, so they tried something else. There is a place for legitimate stewardship of God’s earth, but it is in the name of and FOR God that we do so, as a form of worship. This twisted version of the same uses that legitimate sentiment and turns it around on itself as a form of social control. And that’s all it is. Hey, don’t pee in your drinking water, and try and recycle, but do so to the glory of a higher power, not an earthly one.

In recent weeks while addressing Tea Party rallies here on the left coast, I ask the assembled patriots what appears to be an odd question: “Would all those from the former Soviet Union please raise your hands?”

A notable number of hands are always raised — the San Francisco Bay Area is home to a diverse population.

I then ask another curious question: “What does April 22 signify to you?”

Without exception, someone will shout with great displeasure, “Lenin’s birth date!”

The crowd clearly sees that I’m on to something. I next ask the former Soviets, “And as a young child in school, who were you told is your grandfather?”

At this point several painfully respond, “Vladimir Ilyich Lenin!”

“And in the United States, do you know what we celebrate on April 22?” I ask. “Earth Day. Grandfather Lenin has been conjoined with Mother Earth — and it’s no coincidence.”

In my new book Climategate (released today), I detail the doings of Earth Day’s devious founders. It seems that this crafty crew were cut from cloth that resembles Marx and Lenin, as opposed to Madison and Jefferson.

In 1970, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WS) was Congress’s leading environmentalist activist. Nelson was the mastermind behind those ridiculous teach-ins, which were in vogue in the late sixties and early seventies. During the teach-ins, mutinous school instructors would scrap the day’s assigned curriculum, pressure their students to sit cross-legged on the floor, “rap” about how America is an imperialist nation, and discuss why communism really isn’t such a bad form of government — it just needs to be implemented properly.

Nelson’s teach-in efforts were aided by a young man named Denis Hayes. Hayes was student body president while an undergrad at Stanford, and well known for organizing anti-Vietnam war protests. Later, while pursuing a masters degree in public policy at Harvard, Hayes heard about Senator Nelson’s teach-in concept and eventually helped Nelson institute the practice nationwide. Denis Hayes would also conspire with the senator to found Earth Day.

Rounding out the troika was Professor Paul Ehrlich of Stanford. In 1968 Ehrlich authored the Malthusian missive, The Population Bomb, in which he infamously spouted wild allegations which included equating the earth’s supposed surplus of people with a cancer that needs to be eradicated: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. … We must shift our efforts from treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.”

In 1969, following a much-hyped oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast, an overblown patch of fire on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, and the pharmaceutically induced vibes cast across the nation via the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, Senator Nelson met with Ehrlich and reportedly said, “My God — why not a national teach-in on the environment?” Hayes was brought in to play a pivotal role with organization and implementation. After careful consideration, a name and date for the event were chosen: The inaugural Earth Day would be celebrated April 22, 1970.

Skeptical historians immediately noted a bizarre coincidence. The date coincided with the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Lenin. Earth Day organizers have since tried to brush aside the odd synchronization of dates with lame retorts like “Lenin wasn’t an environmentalist.” But he didn’t have to be. Lenin’s core political philosophy was linked at the hip with these newfangled eco-zealots, who maintained that America’s government must be altered, its economy planned and regulated, and its citizens better-controlled. The environment would be the perfect tool to force these changes, and the most efficient way to gain converts would be through the public school system — the earlier, the better.

Nelson and Ehrlich were already known as non-traditional crackpots, but young Hayes was that and more. In a New York Times article published the morning after the first Earth Day entitled “Angry Coordinator of Earth Day,” young Hayes bragged that five years earlier, he fled overseas because “I had to get away from America.” Hayes was so committed to his anti-capitalist cause that he made sure that his organization did not even produce Earth Day bumper stickers. “You want to know why?” He explained to the Times: “Because they go on automobiles.”

That volcano probably emits more gas in 10 minutes than a single state in a month. Gore should call the UN for a resolution or something 😐

REYKJAVIK (Reuters) – An Icelandic volcano is still spewing ash into the air in a massive plume that has disrupted air traffic across Europe and shows little sign of letting up, officials said on Friday.

One expert said the eruption could abate in the coming days, but a government spokesman said ash would keep drifting into the skies of Europe.

The thick, dark brown ash cloud has shut down air traffic across northern Europe and restrictions remained in place in many areas. However, Norway said it had resumed some limited flights in the north of the country.

“It is more or less the same situation as yesterday, it is still erupting, still exploding, still producing gas,” University of Iceland professor Armann Hoskuldsson told Reuters.

“We expect it to last for two days or more or something. It cannot continue at this rate for many days. There is a limited amount of magma that can spew out,” he added, saying it was the magma, or molten rock beneath the Earth’s surface, coming out of the volcano that turned into ash.

Acknowledging the rising tide of public skepticism toward global warming, the United Nations announced on March 10 that the IAC would act as an independent reviewer for its climate-science arm, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But a week later, the IAC remains a mystery, and it still hasn’t explained who will be on the review panel or how the panel will operate.

And if it knows, it isn’t saying. “The IAC expects to begin its IPCC review shortly and issue a report by August 31. There is no other statement,” Anne Muller, program coordinator at the IAC, told FoxNews.com.

The IAC was founded in 2000 as an advisory body for the U.N. and the World Bank. Hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in the Netherlands, the organization’s Web site indicates that it focuses on a range of issues, from examining “climate change and genetically modified organisms to the crucial challenge of achieving sustainability.”

But in the decade it has existed, the IAC has accomplished little relevant to climate change — the four major reports it has produced have focused on topics ranging from African agriculture to the role of women in science — leading some experts to voice concerns that its review ultimately will be a whitewash, designed to silence them and provide cover for politicians.

“I’ve never heard of the group,” Howard Hayden, editor and publisher of the Energy Advocate newsletter, told FoxNews.com.

He cited the first sentence from the IAC’s 2007 report, “Toward a Sustainable Energy Future,” which states that “achieving a sustainable energy future presents an urgent challenge for the 21st century. Current patterns of energy resources and energy usage are proving detrimental to the long-term welfare of humanity.”

They just won’t see the light, will they? Wonder when they will realize that like every other country where this has been tried, there were no gains. There were only losses that more than offset any gains in the so-called ‘green jobs’.

California is likely to see modest job losses in the near term from its aggressive climate change policy due to higher energy costs and other factors, the state’s independent Legislative Analyst’s Office said. Skip related content

The budget watchdog was responding to a request by Republican state Senator Dave Cogdill to study the effects of California’s 2006 climate change law, which mandates changes to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

His appointment was hailed by both the Sierra Club and Duke Energy Company of North Carolina. Sierra Club President Carl Pope said, “As polluters and their allies continue to try to muddy the waters around climate science, the Climate Service will provide easy, direct access to the valuable scientific research undertaken by government scientists and others.” And Duke Energy CEO Jin Rogers said the new office, under Karl, will “spark the consensus we need to move forward.”

But Roger Pielke Sr., a climatologist affiliated with the University of Colorado who has crossed horns with Karl in the past, says his appointment was a mistake. He accused Karl of suppressing data he submitted for the IPCC’s most recent report on climate change and having a very narrow view of its causes.

The IPCC is charged with reviewing scientific data on climate change and providing policy makers and others with an assessment of current knowledge.

Pielke said he agrees that global warming is happening and that man plays a significant role in it, but he said there are many factors in addition to the release of carbon into the atmosphere that need to be studied to fully understand the phenomenon. He said he resigned from the IPCC in August 2005 because his data, and the work of numerous other scientists, were not included in its most recent report.

In his resignation letter, Pielke wrote that he had completed the assessment of current knowledge for his chapter of the report, when Karl abruptly took control of the final draft. He said the chapter he had nearly completed was then rewritten with a too-narrow focus.

One of the key areas of dispute, he said, was in describing “recent regional trends in surface and tropospheric temperatures,” and the impact of land use on temperatures. It is the interpretation of this data on which the intellectual basis of the idea of global warming hangs.